There has been considerable recent interest in a number of questions related to theory within computing education research. In this editorial, we summarize some of this recent interest, discuss the process in which this special issue came to be, and how papers were selected for inclusion. We end with a brief summary of each of the six papers appearing in this special issue, highlighting the relevance of each to this issue's theme.

It is common to think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge by an individual learner. Starting a century ago, Lev Vygotsky developed a different perspective on learning, initiating a tradition of educational research whose momentum and influence continue to grow. One of Vygotsky's key principles is the general genetic law of cultural development that states that whatever skilled cognition that individuals carry out within their own minds is preceded by homologous activity carried out by a social group of which this individual was a part. In linking the individual and society through this law, learning is not simply a matter of the acquisition of domain knowledge. Rather, it is a cyclic process by which a social group, in its functioning through joint activity, leads to individuals taking into themselves (i.e., internalizing ) the social forms of activity. In this article, our goal is to explicate Vygotsky's genetic law and demonstrate its utility for yielding novel insight into computing education. We provide an extended illustration of the use of Vygotsky's law in examining a teacher and students in a university setting write code together during a class session. What our analysis reveals is that the teacher and students together enact a sequential, rule-based, and dialogical process of problem decomposition and code writing far different from the plan and schema-based models for programming that have emerged from prior research focused on the individual student and their cognitive strategies and structures. We provide commentary on implications of the genetic law for both research and practice in computing education.

This editorial marks the end of our tenure as founding co-editors-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE). We have three goals in this editorial. First, we provide a retrospective on how we positioned TOCE, both in terms of how it embodies our conception of Computing Education Research (CER) as a field, as well as the journal's role in the larger computing education community and the ACM. We focus on the process by which we determined what constitutes publishability for a manuscript submitted to TOCE, describing what is best understood as a living process negotiated among the authors, reviewers, associate editors, and editors-in-chief in interaction with manuscripts and one another. Second, having reviewed a bit of history, we look at some possible changes in TOCE's future, particularly in light of conversations that the ACM is engaged in at all levels regarding recent open publishing initiatives as well as the relationship between journal and conference publications. Finally, we thank the many people who have contributed to the success of TOCE for their significant effort in establishing TOCE as a publication venue for papers in computing education.

Computer programs are addressed to two different audiences: to the computer, which interprets the program according to the formal semantics of the programming language in which it is written, and to human readers, who try to discern how the program will operate in a real-world context. In this paper, we use Bakhtin's notion of dialogicality, along with recent research in psycholinguistics and evolutionary psychology, as a theoretical basis for reflecting on the way in which computer programs embed cooperative communicative norms between programmers and program readers, and how these can be and sometimes are exploited in the program text. In doing so, this provides an important set of theoretical lenses for undertaking and interpreting empirical research in computer science education.

Asking significant research questions is a crucial aspect of building a research foundation in computer science (CS) education. In this article, I argue that the questions that we ask are shaped by internalized theoretical presuppositions about how the social and behavioral worlds operate. And although such presuppositions are essential in making the world sensible, at the same time they preclude carrying out many research studies that may further our collective research enterprise. I build this argument by first considering a few proposed research questions typical of much of the existing research in CS education, making visible the cognitivist assumptions that these questions presuppose. I then provide a different set of assumptions based on sociocultural theories of cognition and enumerate some of the (different) research questions to which these presuppositions give rise. My point is not to debate the merits of the contrasting theories but to demonstrate how theories about how minds and sociality operate are imminent in the very questions that researchers ask. Finally, I argue that by appropriating existing theory from the social, behavioral, and learning sciences, and making such theories explicit in carrying out and reporting their research, CS education researchers will advance the field.

This special issue on computing education in (K-12) schools represents considerable effort by the editorial team, authors, and reviewers. It provides a series of country-specific case studies of computing education in schools that highlights the way in which curricula emerge from each country’s specific historical and cultural circumstances. As a result, not only is there much to learn from each of the case studies, but there are additional lessons in the commonalities and generalizations obtainable only by having a rich set of case studies such as these that can be viewed comparatively.

This paper argues that understanding how professional software developers use diagrams and sketches in their work is an underexplored terrain. We illustrate this by summarizing a number of studies on sketching and diagramming across a variety of domains, and arguing for their limited generalizability. In order to develop further insight, we describe the design of a research project we are embarking upon and its grounding theoretical assumptions.

In this paper we suggest that in order to advance, the field of computer science education needs to craft its own research methods, to augment the borrowing of "traditional" methods such as semi-structured interviews and surveys from other research traditions. Two example instruments used in our recent research are discussed. We adopt the metaphor of "bricolage" to characterise not only what researchers do, but to argue that this may be a necessary step towards developing theory.

We often learn of successful pedagogical experiments, but we seldom hear of the the ones that failed. For this special session we solicited submissions from the SIGCSE membership, selected the best from among these, and will have presentations at the session by the selected authors. Our contributions describe pedagogical approaches that seemed to be good ideas but turned out as failures. Contributors will describe their pedagogical experiment, the rationale for the experiment, evidence of failure, and lessons learned.

The goal of this editorial is to to provide entry points into the literature on making and warranting claims in the social and behavioral sciences that might be of use to computing educators. In addition, we provide some heuristic advice on getting started and continuing along this direction based on our experience as computing education researchers.

The goal of this editorial is to both encourage authors to continue to submit articles describing computational tools for computing education to TOCE, and to make explicit our expectations as the editors of TOCE for what makes a good “tools” article. We elaborate three key criteria, and provide examples from previous TOCE papers that satisfy these criteria: 1) establish that the tool is related essentially to computing education, 2) make explicit claims about the impact of the tool on learning, and 3) evidence these claims through actual use.

No abstract available.

The Industry Fellows project involves a practicing college or university faculty member and practicing industry professional (the industry fellow) in the joint curriculum review, planning and delivery of a course related to the professional's domain of expertise. Working together exploits what each does best. The faculty member brings a broad, theory-based understanding to the discipline, while the industry fellow brings knowledge gained from professional practice. The faculty member retains full responsibility for all academic aspects of the course: planning and writing the syllabus, developing the assignments and examinations, and assigning grades. The professional joins the faculty member in the classroom on a regular basis as a co-lecturer, interacts directly with the students, and evaluates a sample of the student work on an advisory basis. This model was successfully run in winter 2009, with the project leader collaborating with an interaction designer from Google on teaching a Human Computer Interaction course at the University of Washington, Tacoma (UWT). This paper describes the Industry Fellows model, its instantiation at UWT, and an evaluation of this instantiation.

Scholarly communities in computing determine how to produce and validate knowledge within their domains of focus. Much of this knowledge can remain tacit because of shared ways of becoming a disciplinary scholar within any particular area of computing. But such tacitness presents challenges for computing education scholarship, since knowledge about how to create and validate claims about human thinking and learning is rarely a part of the training for computing educators. The editors-in-chief of TOCE have responded to these challenges by making explicit the epistemic practices associated with the publication of its manuscripts, by encouraging a range of borrowing from other disciplines, and by instituting feedback loops at all levels of review.

Most scientific articles address particular questions which are part of larger questions. The part-whole relationship varies.

The ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) represents a name change and a broadening of scope for the ACM Journal on Educational Resources on Computing (JERIC). The topics covered by this new journal will range across diverse aspects of computing education: traditional computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information technology, and informatics; emerging aspects of computing; and applications of computing to other disciplines, such as computational biology. The common characteristics shared by these articles are a scholarly approach to teaching and learning, a broad appeal to educational practitioners, and a clear connection to student learning.

We often learn of successful pedagogical experiments, but we seldom hear of the the ones that failed. For this special session we solicited submissions from the SIGCSE membership, selected the best from among these, and will have presentations at the session by the selected authors. Our contributions describe pedagogical approaches that seemed to be good ideas but turned out as failures. Contributors will describe their pedagogical experiment, the rationale for the experiment, evidence of failure, and lessons learned.

This panel is directed to members of the SIGCSE community who would like to learn more about the places to publish in computing education and how to get published there. This panel brings together conference, journal, and book-series editors to share their insights as "gatekeepers" of their respective publication venues.

Revising and extending conference articles for journal publication benefits both authors and readers. The new articles are more complete, and benefit from peer review, feedback from conference presentation, and greater editorial consistency. For those articles that are appropriate, we encourage authors to do this, and present two examples of such articles in this issue.

Some have proposed that realistic problem situations are better for learning. This issue contains two articles that examine the effects of “making it real” in computer architecture and human-computer interaction.

This special issue features a set of papers recently published in the 3rd International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER'07). The papers were selected because they closely meet the publication criteria for ACM/JERIC: stemming from computing education practice, grounded in relevant literature, containing analysis of primary empirical data collected to support specific claims, and providing implications for practice. In addition, the diverse set of research methods used demonstrates how empirical methods can be chosen to serve the specific questions of interest, whether for purposes of research or for improvement of teaching practice. This set of papers can therefore serve as examplars and resources for the educator wishing to develop a wider range of tools for probing issues of teaching and learning within the classroom.

We invite submissions to ACM/JERIC from teaching practitioners who are our readers. Grounding these submissions in the lived practice of teaching; using data that is already collected to assess student learning; and reporting the data collection, analysis, and context of use accurately and honestly are key aspects for taking a scholarly approach to teaching and learning. We hope to see more such scholarly inquiries by computing educators in the pages of future issues.

The role of prototypes is well established in the field of HCI and Design. A lack of knowledge, however, about the fundamental nature of prototypes still exists. Researchers have attempted to identify different types of prototypes, such as low- vs. high-fidelity prototypes, but these attempts have centered on evaluation rather than support of design exploration. There have also been efforts to provide new ways of thinking about the activity of using prototypes, such as experience prototyping and paper prototyping, but these efforts do not provide a discourse for understanding fundamental characteristics of prototypes. In this article, we propose an anatomy of prototypes as a framework for prototype conceptualization. We view prototypes not only in their role in evaluation but also in their generative role in enabling designers to reflect on their design activities in exploring a design space. We base this framework on the findings of two case studies that reveal two key dimensions: prototypes as filters and prototypes as manifestations. We explain why these two dimensions are important and how this conceptual framework can benefit our field by establishing more solid and systematic knowledge about prototypes and prototyping.

While software is increasingly being improved to enhance access and use, software interfaces nonetheless often create barriers for people who are blind. In response, the blind computer user develops workarounds, strategies to overcome the constraints of a physical and social world engineered for the sighted. This paper describes an interview and observational study of a blind college student interacting with various technologies within her home. Structured around Blythe, Monk and Park's Technology Biographies, these experience centered sessions focus not only on technology function, but on the relationship of function to the meanings and values that this student attributes to technology use in different settings. Studying a single user across a range of devices and tasks provides a broader and more nuanced understanding of the contexts and causes of task failure and of the workarounds employed than is possible with a more narrowly focused usability study. Themes that were revealed across a range of tasks include the importance for technologies to not "mark" the user as being blind within a predominantly sighted social world, to support user independence through portability and user control, and to allow user "resets" and brute-force fallbacks in the face of persistent task failure.

In this paper, we present an extended examination of a specific, single, instance of transfer of teaching practice. The investigation uses a combination of interpretative analytic techniques from critical literary studies, and grounded theory. From this analysis we make conjectures about some of the ways in which educators change their teaching practice and suggest that these natural practices hold a challenge both for computing education research and educational development.

No abstract available.

The Disciplinary Commons project had two primary objectives: to document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants' classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions.

As the new Editors-in-Chief, we outline our vision for building JERIC to become the premier journal in computing education. Doing so will require authors who submit high-quality articles--their „best stuff”, reviewers who provide the feedback and guidance to ensure that each article embodies a scholarly approach to teaching and learning while being of practical use to the computing educator, and readers who read the articles, critically evaluate and discuss the findings with others, and adapt, adopt, and evaluate these findings in their own classrooms.

A goal of JERIC is to support educational practice by publishing articles that are useful to classroom instructors. One way of ensuring this utility is to require that claims are backed up by evidence. This evidence allows the reader to evaluate the potential effectiveness and transferability of any appraoches presented in these articles to their own courses and situations.

This issue is devoted to the curriculum guidelines from the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. These guidelines provide a coherent and important model for computing education within a liberal arts context, giving primacy to critical reason, rigorous methods, and student engagement in the research process. In this regard, they are at the same time both conservative, by giving low priority to the latest technologies, and radical by resisting the managerial impulse that at its worst commidifies and devalues higher education.

One indication of the maturation of Computer Science Education as a research-based discipline is the recent emergence of several large-scale studies spanning multiple institutions. This paper examines a "family" of these multi-institutional, multi-national studies, detailing core elements and points of difference in both study design and the organization of the research team, and highlighting the costs and benefits associated with the different approaches.

This paper describes an empirical study that investigates the knowledge that Computer Science students have about the extent of their own previous learning. The study compares self-generated estimates of performance with actual performance on a data structures quiz taken by undergraduate students in courses requiring data structures as a pre-requisite. The study is contextualized and grounded within a research paradigm in Psychology called calibration of knowledge that suggests that self-knowledge across a range of disciplines is highly unreliable. Such self-knowledge is important because of its role in meta-cognition, particularly in cognitive self-regulation and monitoring. It is also important because of the credence that faculty give to student self-reports. Our results indicate that Computer Science student self-estimates correlate moderately with their performance on a quiz, more so for estimates provided after they have taken the quiz than before. The pedagogical implications are that students should be provided with regular opportunities for empirical validation of their knowledge as well as being taught the metacognitive skills of regular self-testing in order to overcome validation bias.

Abstract: Among the knowledge elicitation techniques card sorting is notable for its simplicity of use, its focus on subjects' terminology (rather than that of external experts) and its ability to elicit semi-tacit knowledge. Card sorting involves categorizing a set of pictures, objects or labelled cards into distinct groups using a single criterion. This paper focuses on the challenges associated with analyzing the data that result from card sorts, especially when large data sets are generated. Traditional semantic analysis methods that require direct researcher interpretation of elicited linguistic terms are distinguished from methods that are purely syntactic, and hence can be automated. Each paper within this special issue is summarized and its contribution to card sorting in general, and data analysis in particular, is highlighted. The set of novel computational techniques presented in several of the papers in this issue is examined. The paper concludes by noting that even large-scale data sets can be meaningfully analysed by combining well-known interpretative methods with the new computational approaches presented within this special issue.

Abstract: This paper presents a case study of the use of a repeated single-criterion card sort with an unusually large, diverse participant group. The study, whose goal was to elicit novice programmers' knowledge of programming concepts, involved over 20 researchers from four continents and 276 participants drawn from 20 different institutions. In this paper we present the design of the study and the unexpected result that there were few discernible systematic differences in the population. The study was one of the activities of the National Science Foundation funded Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education project (2003).

The current debate about the teaching of data structures is hampered because, as a community, we usually debate specifics about data structure implementations and libraries, when the real level of disagreement remains implicit -- the intent behind our teaching. This paper presents a phenomenographic study of the intent of CS educators for teaching data structures in CS2. Based on interviews with Computer Science educators and analysis of CS literature, we identified five categories of intent: developing transferable thinking, improving students' programming skills, knowing "what's under the hood", knowledge of software libraries, and component thinking. The CS community needs to first debate at the level of these categories before moving to more specific issues. This study also serves as an example of how phenomenographic analysis can be used to inform debate on syllabus design in general.

The recent emergence of object-oriented framework libraries of classic data structures and algorithms such as the Standard Template Library and Java's Collection classes provides a set of general and efficient data structure components for use by practicing software developers. A number of textbook writers are beginning to incorporate the use of these frameworks into the traditional first course in data structures at the university level.There has scarcely been a discussion of how these frameworks should best be incorporated into CS2, if they should be used at all. The proposed panel will examine the role of standardized framework libraries in the first data structures course at the university level. Panelists will focus on the following questions. What are the fundamental objectives of CS2, and what role might frameworks have in meeting these objectives? How does an instructor balance student needs for additional instruction in programming basics (e.g. arrays and pointers) versus practice in larger scale design and code reuse? What would be given up to incorporate frameworks into CS2? And to what extent is it important for students to construct elementary data structures from first principles? What assumptions about student cognition and learning does a pro- or con-frameworks approach imply.By trying to articulate answers to some of the above questions, we hope to raise the level of discussion concerning the evolution of the introductory computer science curriculum. This panel will thus try to make explicit, and hence available for critical examination, some of the arguments and assumptions that inform this debate.

This paper advocates the incorporation of object oriented framework libraries such as the Standard Template Library (STL) into the first data structures course at the university level. This represents a shift from learning the details of each data structure to an increased emphasis on the use, integration, and extension of these existing frameworks, as well as on the learning of higher-order design and engineering skills.

In this paper, we describe the implementation and evaluation of the AbTweakplanning system, a test bed for studying and teaching concepts in partial‐order planning, abstraction, and search control. We start by extending the hierarchical, precondition‐elimination abstraction of ABSTRIPS to partial‐order‐based, least‐commitment planners such as Tweak. The resulting system, AbTweak, illustrates the advantages of using abstraction to improve the efficiency of search. We show that by protecting a subset of abstract conditions achieved so far, and by imposing a bias on search toward deeper levels in a hierarchy, planning efficiency can be greatly improved. Finally, we relate AbTweakto other planning systems SNLP, ALPINE, and SIPE by exploring their similarities and differences.